Something shattered when the Georgian artillery opened up with a massive barrage on Tskhinvali on August 7 (Colonel Arsen Tsukhishvili, chief of staff of the Artillery Brigade said with pride that 300 of his gun barrels fired at the enemy simultaneously). What broke was not only the columns of Russian tanks the Georgian artillery was aiming at. It was a 16-year post-Soviet consensus about the power of Russia to affect the course taken by its neighbours. The cold, unspoken western calculation was that, the quicker we pushed eastwards with a combination of political, oil and military projects, the less Russia could resist. Even an economically resurgent Russia was still judged to be either too weak, too poor or just too ramshackle to stop it.

To claim, as David Miliband did yesterday, that Nato did not have a sphere of influence and that the eastern expansion of the military alliance was merely an expression of individual democracies exercising their new-found sovereignty, was breathtakingly disingenuous. In May, a subcommittee of the Nato Parliamentary Assembly, a body that brings together parliamentarians from Nato members and its partners visited Romania and Bulgaria, two of the six states along the Black Sea and the latest members of Nato. The topics discussed on this visit strayed far from its brief - energy and environmental security. The committee heard how Romania and Bulgaria occupy a strategic position between Europe, the largest energy consumer, and the oil-producing countries. Two rival oil and gas pipelines, the EU-backed Nabucco pipeline and the South Stream project backed by Russia, arrive here. Talk of oil and gas led seamlessly on to the military role Nato could play in securing this supply. Paragraph 28 of the executive summary of this visit reads: "Nato has not traditionally played a role in energy security matters ... It can however play a more active role defending energy infrastructure and the flow of oil and gas on the high seas ... Nato might also provide security for infrastructure in energy-producing states facing unrest."

Nato yesterday brushed aside Russian claims that an naval exercise in the western part of the Black Sea had anything to do with the crisis going on in the eastern shore. The Nato parliamentarian's visit held before the Georgian crisis erupted says otherwise. If this is not a "sphere of influence" being constructed and planned by Nato's existing members along Russia's most sensitive border in the South Caucasus and right though Russia's most sensitive sea, what is?

The cold war was a nuclear standoff between two military superpowers with mutually opposed economic systems and ideological beliefs. The new period we could be entering lacks many cold war ingredients. Russia is weaker militarily than the Soviet Union was and its reach is not global. It can sell arms to Syria or Iran, but it can no longer restart the revolution in Angola or Cuba. Russia is unashamedly capitalist. But it is also nowallergicallyanti-western and free to form its own alliances. That was evident in the Russian President Dmitri Medvedev flying eastwards to Tajikistan on Wednesday for a summit with the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, an assembly which includes Russia, China and four former members of the Soviet Union.

The way to counter the forces unleashed on August 7 is clear: stop rearranging the furniture on Russia's sensitive southern border; stop militarising the Black Sea; stop pretending that this is only a conflict about loftier goals, a simple struggle between authoritarianism and western liberal democracy. The ethnically driven post-Soviet map is more complex than that. Local conflicts should be kept local. As things stand, everything is being done to widen them out to the regional level. As a result, Russia and Nato are sleepwalking into a confrontation that neither needs, and neither has planned for.